This invention relates to a device for dismounting an integrated circuit device, and more particularly to a device for melting soldered portions of an integrated circuit device (hereinafter referred to briefly as "IC"), lead portions of which have been soldered to a printed circuit board for an electronic circuit, and dismounts the IC from said circuit board.
The ICs employed in the recently developed electronic components are very small, not only in overall size and shape but, especially, in the length of leads. A typical method for mounting these ICs comprises soldering the ICs and other electronic parts integratedly to a printed circuit board in electrically conductive relationship with each other. The ICs once soldered to the printed circuit board, however, have sometimes to be dismounted, because of a defect therein or a wrong arrangement thereof, by melting the soldered portions.
A conventional method of dismounting an IC package having a plurality of leads extending from its periphery and soldered to the corresponding conductive portions printed on the circuit board comprises melting the solder at each of the leads with a soldering ion and picking out each lead with a pair of tweezers or the like one by one until the entire IC is completely removed from the board. This conventional method is disadvantageous in that since an IC has many soldered leads, considerable manual work is required to dismount the IC and since the leads of the IC are of short length (a recent standard lists a flat-package type IC having a lead pitch of 1.27 millimeters, a lead width of 0.51 to 0.35 millimeters and a lead length of 0.25 millimeters), the dismounting work is delicate and requires a great deal of skill. Moreover, the conventional method has the additional disadvantage that mechanical damage to the body and leads of an IC is inevitable, the functions of the semiconductor contained in the IC are sometimes adversely affected by the heat evolved from the melting solder, and the printed circuit board which is more expensive than the ICs is sometimes damaged to the extent that it cannot be reused.